Re: Last movie you watched

The DiF commentary for the first one mentions a Shakespeare quote: "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". The Last Knight isn't even a tale, it's incoherent rambling.

The plot is an unfocused mess that makes Dark Of The Moon look like Shawshank.

SPOILER Show

Just like all the previous Transformers sequels, The Last Knight clumsily retcons the history of Cybertronians on Earth (which also turns out to be a giant robot). Megatron isn't Galvatron anymore, without any explanation (he might've gotten a new body from Quintessa; how and why they met is never clarified). Several Decepticon characters get introduced only to be dispatched by the Autobots in the next scene. The two Dinobots don't do anything interesting. Mini-Dinobots exist solely for kid appeal, as does "Little J-Lo" and her pet robot.

Even Stanley Tucci and John Turturro aren't very fun to watch this time. Anthony Hopkins does the best he can, but the script gives him no help (I hope that at least he got paid well for this). The robot characters don't fare any better (John Goodman's talents are totally wasted) and the few transformation sequences we get seem less impressive than the ones made a decade ago.

To add insult to injury, the aspect ratio changes at almost every shot transition. It must be an IMAX thing, but I can't figure out why was it carried over to home video releases; it can be very distracting. Some movies (like Scott Pilgrim) use this gimmick for a reason; here it makes no sense whatsoever.

There's a silver lining to all this, however: box office suggests that many moviegoers don't fall for this crap anymore (even China generated significantly less profit this time).

Re: Last movie you watched

. . . huh.

The moon landing sequence by itself is gorgeous, though that was a given going in. The rest . . . I'm not really a fan of Ryan Gosling outside of The Nice Guys, and he was just straight sleepwalking through this. I can't particularly blame him—the screenplay drastically underwrites every single character, and he gets the worst of it. His Neil Armstrong is basically an empty shell, a protagonist whose self I couldn't tell you a single thing about. Claire Foy does her best with a similarly empty role and gets better results, but she can't overcome the fact that there's no emotional throughline here. Though the screenplay certainly seems to think there is—tries to make us think toward the end that the whole movie has been about Armstrong's grief for his dead daughter and the whole thing is so blatantly manipulative I had to roll my eyes.

Also meh on the filmmaking itself. This movie seems to take all the wrong lessons from Dunkirk, a film that I love—it's so focused on trying to communicate the visceral experience of space travel that it overplays its hand to an insane degree. Whole sequences are basically just collections of shaky closeups, to the point that it's impossible to tell what's going on. And the sound mix is absolutely obnoxious—maybe I'm just getting too old for this, but the monotonous shriek of everything was just an irritant rather than immersive in any way. Chazelle is so focused on trying to pound an EXPERIENCE into you that he ends up managing to evoke nothing at all.

The film stock was pretty, anyway—very nice grain.

I dunno, I'm being too hard on it—I can't say it's a bad film, just a thoroughly mediocre one with some cool moments. Half of it is trying and failing to be a Christopher Nolan film, and the other half is trying and failing to be the off-kilter arthouse biopic that Jackie was but with an absolutely by-the-numbers script, and it just doesn't gel.

For better or worse, Whiplash is still Chazelle's best movie. It's kind of adolescent but doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is, an exercise in ratcheting up tension with broad character beats that are redeemed by the performers. La La Land is gorgeous visually but absolutely lifeless, and First Man is that same melody in a different key. (Had to slip a musical thing in there somewhere.)

Re: Last movie you watched

Unfortunate, but reminds me that I've got to watch Apollo 11 VR, not that I expect emotional drama out of it (it's documentary more than drama) but at least it'll, as you say, communicate that visceral experience better.

Re: Last movie you watched

That's worrisome, 'cause I had pretty high expectations for First Man.

While the "conveying an experience" thing usually works for me in Kubrick movies, I didn't like Dunkirk very much. It's impressive on some levels (especially considering the moderate budget), but it was hard to connect with it. Nolan tried way too hard to be Kubrick and I like Nolan when he's Nolan.

Re: Last movie you watched

Yeah, I also just saw FIRST MAN, and that opening X-15 sequence is ear-splitting. I swear I heard squealing pigs in the sound design. It was visceral as Darth says. It's probably the most appropriate use of shaky-cam I've ever seen, and I normally love the smooth Fincher/Cuarón style.

Yeah, Armstrong was notoriously private/shy/introverted. A closed-book. And a lot of those Right Stuff era astronauts were a little bit on the spectrum. So Gosling's understated performance worked well. No high-fiving 'need for speed' swagger here.

Just like the Darwin biopic, CREATION, it risked swamping the interesting story with a father-dead daughter subplot.

The movie is not a conventional narrative - more a series of vignettes. The Gemini 8 launch was all POV from inside the cockpit. Hardly any glory/money shoots in the entire movie, which is an odd choice i.e. the director chooses to keep the focus on Armstrong, yet doesn't give him much to emote to. He just bottles everything up, or shrugs off big news like the announcement he'll be leading #11 (received as he's washing his hands). He could have just been told he's got to empty the bins before knocking off for the shift - same reaction.

The moon descent sequence was great with the fuel gauge, looming crater, boulder-field, alarms, etc. Talk about keeping your cool. Balls of steel. What a heroic age. Just what's needed in Trump era.

P.S. And you DO see an American flag on the surface. Conservatives should shut the fuck up about their 'not enough flag' whinging. This is a movie that should appeal to both sides. Can't believe even this has to be politicised. I suppose if there had been an extended sequence of flag-planting in slow-mo with saluting and swelling music and rubbing out a load over it, then the left would be complaining about fascistic hyper-patriotism. It's not that kind of movie.

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What a mess...

Venom feels like a B-movie. No, not like a post-Alien monster flick that uses B-movie tropes very well (The Thing, The Fly etc.); like an actual B-movie from the double feature era - a quick, low-budget sci-fi schlock nobody cares about. Clearly nobody cared about Venom's script; it has no identity of its own. It could have been a Deadpool-esque dark comedy about demonic possession or schizophrenia, but it looks like someone (the studio?) insisted on making it more of a generic comic book movie about saving the world. The result is a confused hybrid not unlike Venom himself. Tom Hardy's performance stands out, but that's not unusual - he's always good, even in crappy movies (his Shinzon makes Nemesis almost bearable).

Re: Last movie you watched

Seriously underrated this on my first watch a couple of years ago. Welles' performance as Falstaff is fucking unreal—he's great in a lot of other movies, but even his best performances tend to be "Orson Welles with [x] veneer." Not so here—he is Falstaff, the Platonic ideal of the character. And the central Battle of Shrewsbury remains breathtaking over fifty years later—the editorial feat of making less than 200 extras appear to be armies of thousands is just . . . God, what do you even say?

Also, I feel like this film is probably definitive evidence that no movie should be longer than two hours (I say as someone who loves quite a few three-hour movies). Orson Welles folded both parts of Henry IV and bits and pieces of three other plays into one two-hour movie and in doing so made one of the best Shakespeare films ever. Bad Times at the El Royale had to be 140 minutes why, exactly?

Re: Last movie you watched

The meet-cute first act is sooo good, but after that it dives into a heap of cliches, trading in potential greatness for competence. Still, a lot to like here, especially in the performances—Sam Elliott's impact in just a few minutes of screentime should be enough to get him the supporting Oscar, and Cooper and Gaga are both excellent.

The songs are a pretty mixed bag—after months of hoping this wouldn't be the next La La Land, sigh—but Gaga's voice is a punch to the throat. If nothing else, take three minutes out of your day and listen to her performance of "La Vie en Rose"—it's her first number in the movie, and god damn.

Re: Last movie you watched

Damn.

Fucking revelatory in the context of the period—if this had been released in 1976 as Welles intended, it would have broken people's brains. The documentary/found-footage conceit is already like nothing else from that time, but throw in an editing style that's most accurately described as F for Fake on steroids and it becomes unreal. The film-within-a-film, even though it's designed to poke fun at the New Wave, is unbelievably pretty—for someone who insisted on shooting on black-and-white for the majority of his career, Welles is a master of color.

In terms of content, I want to take time (and rewatches) to digest, but it's far and away Welles' funniest movie. He's taking shots at everyone, including himself, and refuses to let up for nearly two hours. Huston is, of course, fantastic, but Bogdanovich is maybe even better, and the two characters' relationship is even more poignant if you're familiar with the relationship Bogdanovich and Welles shared.

Of course, we'll never truly know what Welles' definitive version of the film would have been, and the bits and pieces that remind us of this are a bit jarring—Bogdanovich had to rewrite the opening narration, as Welles never recorded it, and its casual mention of cell phone cameras is so fucking weird. But in a way that's the perfect capstone to the man's career—his filmography is a collection of ghosts, movies that were robbed of their definitive versions or made on shoestring budgets or simply thrown away. In any case, I'm comfortable with calling it one of my favorites of his, and I suspect my appreciation will only grow upon further viewings.

Got to fly out to San Francisco and see it on a theatre screen, which I'll be eternally grateful for. It just felt right (she said, the pretentious ass). Pairs very well with the bummer of a companion documentary They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, which is also on Netflix and examines all the rotten luck that prevented Welles from finishing the film while he was alive.

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Touch of Evil is excellent--since you have the Blu, make sure you do the cut that was reconstructed according to his wishes (restores a lot of stuff the studio trimmed for very arbitrary reasons). Kane is, of course, Kane, and Chimes at Midnight and F for Fake are masterpieces too.

Basically every single one of his movies is worth seeing--even Mr. Arkadin and The Immortal Story, which are my least favorites, have some gorgeous cinematography, and The Magnificent Ambersons, while it was savaged within an inch of its life by RKO, still has remnants of greatness.

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Didn't log this the day I saw it, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. Dearly hope it's not the Coens' last movie, but it feels like if it were it would be totally fitting. Each of the six segments seems to serve as commentary on a different facet of their career, and more than ever the brothers seem to be actively engaging the critics who claim there's nothing more to them but cruelty. Not that there aren't plenty of moments of cruelty in the movie, mind—some of them slapstick, some of them crushing—but that's not anything projected onto the world by the Coens. That's just the world, like it or not.

Delbonnel's photography is gorgeous—it's the Coens' first movie shot on digital, and while at some points it can get a bit plasticky the colors and landscapes are awe-inspiring. (Caught it at a local theatre, where Netflix allowed it to play, and am very glad I did.) And Burwell's score is as masterly as ever; he might be the most underappreciated film composer we've got working.

Ranking their films has been a meme passing around film Twitter as of late, so I'll do it seriously here just 'cuz (save for Intolerable Cruelty, which I've yet to see). Apart from The Ladykillers and to a lesser extent The Hudsucker Proxy, they've yet to make a bad movie, and have made at least 11 truly great ones. Helluva batting average.

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looks around

whispers

kinda didn't love it

It's good, of course! In my top 20 of the year, no question. The photography and sound mix are legitimately breathtaking. I swear to god this will be the last movie for a while where I mention I'm glad Netflix put it in theatres, but seriously, this demands to be seen big—Cuaron shot on the Alexa 65 and the clarity and depth of field are fucking insane.

But it left me cold emotionally, which I feel guilty even typing because God knows Cuaron is one of my favorite directors and everyone else seems to be head over heels for it. Were it a first-time feature I'd probably be knocked on my ass, and the photography, again because I can't emphasize it enough, is stunning. Just didn't do it for me feelings-wise in the way Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien, or Gravity have.

Re: Last movie you watched

Not nearly as brilliant as The LEGO Movie, but still pretty good. Smallfoot is a movie ABOUT SOMETHING, which cannot be said about many other modern animated flicks.

(It turns out that independent thinking is the worst threat to the children nowadays. I'd like to thank all the crazy right-wing trolls on the Internet for manufacturing this ridiculous controversy - without it, I probably wouldn't have heard about this movie )

I haven't seen Storks yet, but the rest of Warner Animation Group's filmography is quite promising, they actually can become a solid competitor to Pixar.

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Mortal Engines

Enjoyable. Dialogue errs on the side of corny and you can tell where character arcs were truncated, either while writing the screenplay from the original novel or in the editing bay after shooting, to save runtime.

I went into it knowing its pedigree of a dystopian YA novel. Do the same and you'll have managed your expectations enough to enjoy it. It won't make any sort of lasting impact but it deserved more than the dozen or so people in our theater on opening weekend.

(Also I want a badass longcoat, as is generally the case after seeing movies like this.)

Boter, formerly of TF.N as Boter and DarthArjuna. I like making movies and playing games, in one order or another.

Re: Last movie you watched

Boter wrote:

Mortal Engines

Enjoyable. Dialogue errs on the side of corny and you can tell where character arcs were truncated, either while writing the screenplay from the original novel or in the editing bay after shooting, to save runtime.

I went into it knowing its pedigree of a dystopian YA novel. Do the same and you'll have managed your expectations enough to enjoy it. It won't make any sort of lasting impact but it deserved more than the dozen or so people in our theater on opening weekend.

(Also I want a badass longcoat, as is generally the case after seeing movies like this.)

Perhaps we should start a company "Long Badass Coats" dot com. Because I need one as well.

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Well, whaddya know? A Transformers movie that doesn't suck.

Bumblebee is an '80s movie made in 2018. While it's simply a typical (you might even say "stereotypical"), by-the-numbers '80s "kids' movie", it works just fine. The 1980s (with all their E.T.-esque silliness and childish sense of wonder) were the missing ingredient all along (after all, the franchise was born in that decade). I'm sure it made Spielberg smile.

Not brilliant enough to single-handedly salvage the DC film universe, but it doesn't damage it further. Aquaman is an adventure more lighthearted than the previous DC installments; it basically turns the title character into DC's Thor. The eye candy is enjoyable; the story is nothing special, but it doesn't get in the way of enjoying the eye candy.

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Teague wrote:

How would Bumblebee fare in a double-feature with Real Steel?

I don't remember Real Steel very well, but it definitely had a similar feel - a nostalgic and somewhat formulaic homage to older movies (turns out it was produced by Spielberg and Zemeckis, which makes perfect sense).